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06/22/2004 Archived Entry: "Weblogging Part III"

Not to stretch out the weblogging thing too much...ok, I do want to keep it stretched (like Plastic Man; it stretches out until it gets too tangled to unstretch).
Some parts of composition studies want to get folks blogging in class. Other parts (though often the same) deny any need for technological know how (or a very limited grasp), thus differentiating between knowing technology and knowing writing (and this is where I part ways since I see the two as the same).
Without knowing both technology (and I'm not talking about tech-guru status here) and writing, there exist, then, serious limitations to enacting the blogging experience (like Derrida, I put another side comment here since I don't even care that much about blogs - I care about the generalizeable application of rhetoric to the digital. So include blogs. But, of course, include so much more).
Think about Warren Ellis zapping writing to his site via his phone, soliciting ideas and music and then posting them to his site, having others zap their photos to his site....and so on. We're getting interactive spaces here, eh? Or what about the manipulation and appropriation of technology for new communicative purposes, as in rigging iPods to become broadcast stations? Not to mention, of course, the iTunes model which could easily be generalized to writings swapped over frequencies (a Burroughs-fest of interruptions and psychotic dreaming, or manifestos and propaganda, or simple ideas floating around on an invisible network of webs....). I'd like to see an iTunes-styled composition class. Essays are turned in over each others file-swapping iPod-devices...but you can reach in too and rearrange the other's stuff (let's get Ted Nelson on this baby)! Then there's the Urban Tapestries project. Whew. Here's some serious usage of technology (and hey, you could do this with weblogs to some extent - or with a type of weblog not yet invented) and writing. It doesn't have to be done with a phone. Pick or create another device. But make the texts intersect and interact....
And if you can’t repeat the projects from teacher to teacher – as one such teacher made clear as necessary? Uh….so? It will come out a different way - difference and repetition. We’re teaching writing, not building cars.